How Orange County voter will cast their ballots is about to change after the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to overhaul the current precinct system to a voting-center system on Tuesday. Rolling out for the presidential primaries in March of 2020 here are some of the details of the new system.
188 voting centers, will be set up throughout the county, and voters will be allowed to cast their ballot at whichever one they desire. An overhaul of staffing will also occur, replacing volunteer polling workers with better trained workers from the registrar staff.
Locations of these voting centers, according to officials, will most likely be in rented retail spaces and existing voter sites like the Hall of Administration in Santa Ana. With the increasing amount of school shootings, proponents of the change note that many of the current voting places are at schools and this would help secure them by not having a whole precinct freely showing up in the days before an election.
To prevent voter fraud an electronic check-in system will be implemented. This makes it so if anyone does attempt to vote at more than one location, the computer system will automatically be able to flag the fraud. Fraud, in any election, has been an issue and this is a far more reliable option that the previous paper roster.
This is the most cost-effective and efficient option according to Neal Kelley from the Orange County Registrar of Voters. To overhaul and maintain the previous system would of cost somewhere between $23.4 and $40 million, where the estimated cost of the voting-center model is only between $11.2 and $18.8 million.
